Lisa Kudrow Says Friends Cast Scene Was Cut From The Comeback Season 3

The current third and final season of Lisa Kudrow’s hit show The Comeback is notable in that it has not been afraid to make references to her old sitcom, Friends.

The Comeback is a mockumentary format set in contemporary Hollywood, with Lisa’s character Valerie Cherish shooting a new sitcom on the same sound stage as Friends in the latest run of episodes.

Over the course of the series, there’ve also been several nods to Friends, in which Lisa played Phoebe Buffay for 10 seasons, earning six Emmy nominations and one win along the way.

However, in a new interview with The Times, she claimed there was an even more explicit reference to Friends in The Comeback’s original script that she eventually cut.

The outlet claimed that one sequence would have seen Jennifer Aniston inviting Valerie Cherish over to dinner at her house, where she and the other members of the Friends cast would give her a dressing down for agreeing to be in a show written by generative AI.

“I really wanted to make that point,” Lisa explained. “But then with stunt casting, the message sometimes gets overlooked and we had other fish to fry, so we didn’t do it.”

That’s not to say that the current season of The Comeback has been short on cameos, though.

Jane Fonda, Fran Drescher and RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Trixie Mattel are among the stars to make appearances as themselves in The Comeback over the last six episodes, while season three has also added the likes of Andrew Scott, John Early, Abbi Jacobson and Ella Stiller to its recurring cast.

Since Friends came to an end in 2004, the sitcom’s cast have repeatedly made cameos in one another’s projects.

These included appearances from Jennifer Aniston in Courteney Cox’s series Cougar Town and Dirt, and cameos from David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc, Courteney Cox and the late Matthew Perry in Lisa’s show Web Therapy.

David also played himself opposite Matt LeBlanc in Episodes, while Jennifer has also voiced her hopes that Courteney could eventually do a guest spot in her most recent hit, The Morning Show.